Passion Sunday kicks off the run up to the holiest day in the Catholic Calendar, Easter, when Jesus Christ rises from the dead and through it gives us hope in everlasting life. Easter shows us that Jesus Christ is all-powerful God in a way that is convincing enough to fuel almost 400 years of martyrs, to die for Christ despite little if any hope that their preaching of Jesus or their death would have little effect on the cruel Roman culture! But eventually, from the top down, starting with the emperor they converted Rome!
The following is mostly a quote from The Roman Catholic Daily Missal – 1962, Angelus Press in the commentary for the day, the epistle and the Gospel:
“The Mass of Passion Sunday is full of the thought of the Passion of Jesus and of the infidelity of the Jews, whose place in the Kingdom of God was taken by those who were baptized, that is to say by Christians.
From this day until Maundy Thursday, in Masses of the Season the Psalm Judica me is omitted on Sundays and ferias, as also the Gloria Patri at the Introit and as the Lavabo, but on feasts they are said as usual.”
In the epistle Heb. 9:11-15 “St. Paul tells us that our Lord Jesus Christ is the Pontiff and the Mediator of the New Testament. As the High Priest once entered the Holy of Holies by the blood of victims, so, in a more excellent manner, Christ enters into heaven the true Holy of Holies, after having shed His own Blood which He offers to God His Father.”
Finally in the Gospel Jn. 8: 46-59 “St John shows us the growing hatred of the Sanhedrin. The jews who ought to have recognized in Jesus the Son of God, greater than Abraham and the prophets, because He is eternal, disregarded the meaning of His words. The insulted our Lord Jesus Christ, the Messias, Whom they declared to be possessed by a devil, a blasphemer, Whom they would stone to death.”
This was the one time that he said clearly – for any true Jew, by using Gods proper name, the concept of the Non-Contingent Being, that He was God. Specifically: “before Abraham was made, I AM.” [emphasis mine]
Traditional Thomistic Catholic 